Well lets see here
1 - Ignore pretty much anything GG7 has to say, he/she has been known to be factually incorrect about most things, and seems to believe that opinions are facts and suspiciously takes every opportunity to equate hardware specs to knowledge, and back it up with condescension and largely meaningless statements. Made a hilarious post about how ED performance was awful because it was unoptimized, railed on and on about it, when really the truth was he/she was trying to run the game at like 8 or 16 times the resolution and didn't understand that the network jumps between changing instances were purely network and nothing to do with graphics. None the less... that thread lasted forever.... i mean how can you learn anything when you already know it all right?
Actual considerations below based on, experience running ED since the 2014 beta on a range of hardware, from a Core2Quad + GTX295 (and GTX980) , A MacBookPro with a 750M (OSX and W7 Bootcamp) and a i7700K+ GTX980
2 - The game will run fine on a 2GB card, textures are sampled/resampled to fit the settings you request, which change the burden on vram. Thus you likely want medium/low settings in general. Im sure you have done it, but just look at the default low pre-set. You can, if you are desperate, check what sample size is being taken in the xml files in the graphics settings. If it is stuttering away, then there is something else happening.
While fog effects will be turned off by default in low pre-set, some of the lesser powerful GPUs basically crawl when doing any kind of fog or volumetrics.
3 - nVidia often don't update their drivers for all of their cards in sequence, older cards, when selecting the drivers from their website SOMETIMES (but not always) get dropped off and end up a few revisions old compared to the latest and greatest... upon investigation, you should be fine here. The drop off is the 200 and 300 series cards, which are 2 years out of date!
Try a clean install of the drivers using DDU, do the full slow process and when you re-install, don't install any of the extra stuff, like nVidia experience (or what ever its called these days)
In the nVidia control panel try setting power management to max performance. The purpose of the nVidia experience free install is that if you have instant playback turned on, you are needlessly loading the GPU and using the harddrive when it doesn't need to be.
No affect? Try a slightly older driver version...
4 - Do run memtest86 over your ram... remove any overclocking if any. If you have memory issues, it will typically cause BSOD, unless you are running something fancy like ECC ram (you are not, as the system is not a server) as you are getting stutter it is unlikely an issue with this, but, do the check anyway. If the total ram usage on your system is not going over 8, you should be pretty much ok, If something else is eating up memory and you are dropping into swap, that Will cause issues
5 - Defrag your harddrive if it is a mechanical, you want that thing as fast as you can, if your computer has to wait for the drive to read a file across 50 different parts of the drive, you can be sure as hell that it will cause a momentary stutter.
6 - Computer side, ensure your power management is basically set to performance. Iv seen some peoples installations basically default to energy saver for some reason, despite there being no need for it. It can basically cause major CPU throttle back. - Unlikely the issue but give it a look -
7 - Meltdown and Spectre Bugs - If the softpatch fix has been applied, it could very well be the issue. When the CPU makes context changes between Kernel and User mode, one of the fixes is to have the CPU dump its cache and reload the info. This has huge impact depending upon what you are typically doing. There are better methods coming to stamp out the issue, though not sure what the status of those are yet to be honest. Best is a microcode update delivered via bios update... so look for a new bios version for your motherboard... and... very very very carefully update the bios if you feel like you should. Remember to do what ever you think you need to to ensure good luck and the none destruction of your motherboard during that process. (I take zero responsibility etc for people killing their mobos)
Anyway - fingers crossed you can nail what is happening.
